Saturday, May 2, 2009

CowTip is a highly customizable tooltip mod that I have used for a very long time. My favorite aspects of this tooltip mod are:

I can see your guild rank.

I can see your talent spec.

I can see your target.

...and it's all colored by threat, faction, etc.

Unfortunately, out of the box, there is a ton of info cluttering up your tooltip with this mod. I recommend cutting it down to something more readable by removing the labels and anything else you don't want to see, and consolidating the reputation/threat into coloring. Further below, I will give the exact lines that I use to cut down my tooltip to make it easier to read at a glance.

AVAILABLE INFO

What my tooltips tell me:

Raid Target Icon, if applicable

Name: colored by hostility, and adding the realm name if not my own realm.

Target: who they are targeting (colored by class)

Their guild and guild rank (colored by aggro, or green if my guildie)

Level and Race (colored by difficulty), and classification (colored by class)

Faction and if pvp flagged (colored by hostility/faction friendliness)

Pet happiness level (if it is your hunter pet)

Zone (if not the same as you)

Talent spec (class colored)

Health and Power bars

What it could also tell me, if I chose to add it:

Threat

Debuffs (poison, etc)

Buffs (shield wall, DI, soulstone, etc)

Shapeshift form

Spellcasting (the current or last spell cast)

Guild Notes (if in your guild)

Druid Mana

AFK/DND/Dead/Offline

XP/Rest XP

Combo Points

Range

Reputation

If target is MT, MA, ML, raid or party lead, feigned death, or even just tapped

# of raid members targeting them

...and probably some other stuff I missed while browsing the dog-tags.

LINE TEXTS

To edit, you need to go to Line Texts.

For the details on all of the syntax available for your tooltips, you can Open the DogTag help. The DogTags are the syntax used to tell CowTip what information you want displayed, and how to display it (it is also used by other Ace mods, such as PitBull). Frankly, the syntax confuses me too, but you can get some really nice tooltips just by slightly tweaking the defaults so it's not *necessary* to dig through these DogTags.

I highly recommend that you create a backup profile of the default settings, so you can restart from scratch if you accidentally delete a line and don't know what to put back in there.

The Line Texts are organized as though your tooltip was a table with 2 columns. There is a left side and a right side, and the location you paste the syntax in will roughly correspond with the location the data will appear on your tooltip. From the defaults, I did remove most of the left-side labels since I found them redundant and cluttering.

My tooltip line texts are:

Left side:

[(if [IsPlayer or [IsEnemy and not IsPet]] then HostileColor end) NameRealm]

You can re-color your tooltips and skin the health bars as you wish. Personally, I use a "Blizzard Out of Control" background pattern, and set all of the individual background status colors to black since I found the different colors distracting (you may wish to tweak the background colors as well, or leave them at the defaults).

The skins and textures for both the background and the bars can be pulled from sharedmedia libraries. I set my health bar (bottom of tooltip) to have the LiteStepLite texture, and the power bar (lefthand side of the tooltip) to have the Lyfe texture.

POSITION

This panel alters your settings for the location your tooltips will pop up on the screen. Personally, I've never been a fan of having the tooltips pop up in the lower right-hand corner, and usually anchor them to the right side of my screen instead.

There is also a menu for selecting what tooltips even show (the "Show Tooltips" menu), so you can choose to show or hide tooltips of Unit Frames, Non-Unit frames, World Units, and World Objects. You can further clarify if these will only show in combat, or even if your tooltips will only show if you are holding down a specific modifier key (CTRL, ALT, or Shift).

~ If you have any useful custom line texts for CowTip, I'd love to hear about them! ~

Yep, you can set the position to different places around the screen, and set a different position for player tooltips vs item tooltips if you want. I'll edit in to include a screenshot of that interface!